Retired Politicians Spend Unused Campaign Funds

[Ethelk2044]

(edited for copyright purposes: Please limit your snips of
articles to 4 paragraphs )

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/24/nyregion/24retire.html


When Michael J. Bragman, a onetime Assembly majority leader,
retired from the New York State Legislature in 2001, his
campaign committee had about $1 million in the bank. Six years
later, Mr. Bragman is still retired, and $400,000 of that
money is gone.

Mr. Bragman did not run for office again. But he did pay his
wife $24,000 a year to work for a campaign committee that did
no campaigning. And he spent thousands more on bottles of
wine, meals at a yacht club, Christmas gifts and office rental
payments to a company that he appears to control.

Mr. Bragman, a Democrat who represented a district in the
Syracuse area for 21 years, offers an unusually vivid example
of how New York’s campaign finance laws allow former
candidates to keep spending contributions long after their
campaigns end. And he is not alone.

A review of campaign expenditures at the State Board of
Elections found other former officeholders whose unused
campaign cash has been put to uses that their contributors
probably never envisioned — and with little or no scrutiny
from state regulators. While the officeholders are required to
report all expenditures from their committees to the board,
purchases can be listed only by general category and, when
described, often without much detail.

[truthisfreedom]

1. The money has to go somewhere. I think it should be okay to give it to charity

as long as that charity has been in existence for some specified period of time and has a proven track record of delivering a specified percentage to the people in need. As far as spending it on a fictional plan to run again someday, what can be done to protect against fraud in that regard?

A very good way to handle this money would be to donate unspent campaign money directly to whomever they can legally give it to within the party (or to the party itself) for the purposes of helping some other candidates out, with the exception that if they actually were running for office again, they could get it back in full for use in their own campaign.